I just bought an awesome book after work tonight. It’s by one of my favorite authors, Marie-Louise Von Franz. She’s so smart and awesome that my mind always becomes different and better by reading her books. This one’s called Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales. (I also recommend On Divination & Synchronicty, and On Dreams and Death - and of course the Grail Legend, which is how I first started reading her).

I just wanted to save this one passage for myself:

I have never dealt with anybody who committed an actual murder, but I have met people who could have, and that makes one shudder, and one thinks “Hands off,” yet, at the same time, one has the feeling that it is something godlike, no longer human. We use the word “inhuman,” but one could equally well say “demonic” or “divine.” The primitive idea that somebody who commits a murder or an outstanding crime is really not himself but performs something which only a god could expresses the situation very well. In the moment when someone commits a murder he is identical with the Godhead and is not human. People become the instruments of God’s darkness. At such a time, they are possessed. The very fact that somebody imagines that he can kill a fellow being, someone of the same substance as himself, which is not normal, transcends human nature, and in that way the deed has a demonic or divine quality. That is why, for instance, in the ritual executions in primitive tribes, you see that though they kill the criminals, there is no element of moral judgement about it; the criminal simply bears the consequences of his deeds. The primitive says that if a human being acts as though divine, then he suffers the fate of a god, is treated as a god and hanged, killed or dismembered, and so on. One cannot be in human society and behave like a divine being who can kill ad libitum.

I especially like the part where she says “People become the instruments of God’s darkness.” Heavy. After this, she goes into talking about how it was common for criminals to be put to death in a way symbolic of a dark god (hanging from a tree identified them with Odin), because it was understood that they had fallen into the hands of that dark god.